An ink jet recording method is a recording method involving applying an ink droplet to any one of recording media such as plain paper and glossy media to form an image, and had become rapidly widespread owing to a reduction in its cost and an improvement in its recording rate. With the rapid spread of a digital camera in addition to an improvement in quality of an image recorded by the method, the method has been generally used as a method of outputting an image comparable to silver salt photography. Under the circumstances, in order to provide a recorded matter meeting the needs of the times, ideas have been proposed for not only, of course, the properties of ink for use in the ink jet recording method but also the properties of a coloring material.
A coloring material for use in an ink jet yellow ink is expected to migrate hardly, that is, to cause a change in color tone of an image and the color fading of the image hardly. There has been proposed the use of C.I. Direct Yellow 86 or C.I. Direct Yellow 173 as a dye having such property (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H02-233781 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H04-233975).
In addition, a pigment inferior to a dye in color developability but excellent in, for example, the water resistance of an image has been used as a coloring material. In particular, the color developability of C.I. Pigment Yellow 74 is excellent as compared to that of any other pigment having a yellow hue. Therefore, there have been a large number of proposals concerning the use of C.I. Pigment Yellow 74 as a coloring material for the yellow ink (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H11-199811 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2000-281952). Furthermore, there has been proposed the combined use of a dye and a pigment as coloring materials for the purpose of improving the storage stability and color developability of ink (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. S60-45667).